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Comment by codelord | Hacker News Reader

I left my country to escape a totalitarian regime. I think just because you are born in a place doesn't mean you have the responsibility to completely sacrifice your life. Humans collectively have an obligation to help lift poor countries out of poverty. The question is are you against immigration because you genuinely care about the poverty in my country?

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For me it wasn't totalitarian but "corrupt beyond salvation" (think bottom 50 on corruption index). A friend of mine recently went back and lasted six months before he came back to the US - he opened a startup and had to deal with bribes, threats, blackmail and "forced partnerships". I myself would never go back there.

Why do humans collectively have an obligation to lift poor countries out of poverty?

Because the world without poverty is a better place.

You’re just repeating sound bites. Why? explain in detail how this helps humans (especially since it goes against darwinism) and doesn’t hurt them.

If you are a social darwinist, I am not here to convert you.

This seems like a bow out and still I have no answer, just an assumption. So once again, what benefit does humanity have for decreasing poverty instead of the country decreasing it themselves?

I do not owe you answers, but I can continue a conversation if you pay me.

Humanity's competitive advantage—the reason we survive, thrive, and outcompete every other species—is that we work together. We cooperate, to balance one person's weaknesses with another person's strengths.

Social Darwinism is entirely based on misunderstandings of science and history. It is a dead-end philosophy, and needs to be eradicated with knowledge, replaced by the spreading of compassion and cooperation wherever it is found.

I agree with all of this, except I don’t see the value an impoverished set of humans can provide. They will have a point of few that is valid and valuable in certain contexts but are these useful? Secondly when the new baseline is removing poverty you remove the desire to become something more, which is where the real innovation comes from. So by not helping them we get better results, not worse.

Also I would love some papers on how natural selection is no longer valid, this sounds like pure opinion.

Because the opposite is to go and exploit them as it happened for most of the human history and is still happening here and there. Some of those country are drawn in poverty as the result.

Are you already tired of "helping" others? Don't forget that we aren't trying to cooperate for a very long time as it may seem to be. We aren't still great at doing it either.

What may seem to be broken to you isn't wrong in essence. We should help each other. We should support each other. And less poverty is better for all of us. Maybe we should just do it differently. Perhaps the way we are doing it isn't good and we should find a better way to do it.

Calling the Indian Government a totalitarian regime is stretching it a bit too much. India is still a paradise of liberty compared to China and some other countries in our region. Indians want H1B because they want to earn in dollars, plain and simple. All other reasons are secondary. H1B is modern-day bonded labor. You guys are the sugar slaves of this age, like it or not.

Makes you a slave master nonetheless.

As far as I know I'm not from India.

> H1B is modern-day bonded labor.

That's a bit of a stretch, don't you think? Bonded laborers were forbidden to leave their jobs under penalty of the law (like actual prison time). H-1B holders are free to leave any time, they just experience a massive drop in income.

It's not just a "massive drop in income"; if you get fired/laid off or want to leave your H1B job, you have 60 days to leave the country or find a new H1B job (which might not be so easy with quotas & applications etc).

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